


Ashes of the Moon

by MirrorDaltokki



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Mythology, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Disabled Character, Dragon Age: Inquisition Spoilers, Modern Character in Thedas, Modern Girl in Thedas, On Hiatus, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Realistic, Secret Keeper, Tags Contain Spoilers, You Have Been Warned
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:55:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25098007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirrorDaltokki/pseuds/MirrorDaltokki
Summary: Wish yourself away to somewhere better when the world is scarier than before.Min-jee Moon wished someone would stop wishing, or at least put her back where she came from. Stolen away from her home by a crazed man with a desire for forbidden knowledge, she faces a mystery and a life she never asked for. Stripped away from everything she's ever known, Min-jee must make a life for herself in a world that isn't hers.She wishes she was home where it all made sense and nothing was terrible.
Comments: 33
Kudos: 48





	1. Beginning from the End

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for:
> 
> Allusions to::  
> \- Violence  
> \- Torture  
> \- Bad medicine

It stung when she swallowed, the sandpaper of her throat rubbing against the gravel lumps of saliva her parched mouth managed. She didn’t remember when the last time she had slaked her thirst was when the last time she had looked out from the relative safety of her corner and didn’t want for some basic features of a life that was well and lost. Her hair was matted, coated in dirt and questionable bits of matter she was better off not identifying. Her nails were broken and bloody from where she had scrabbled uselessly against cold armor and unyielding stone.

The ache in her stomach as it pressed emptily against her spine was something she had simply grown used to over time, and she was nearly desperate enough to compromise her morals to find some relief. No one would save her. No one even knew she existed, this wild-eyed thing dwelling in the back of some godforsaken stone cell. She could lick at the damp that trickled down the walls all she liked. But the first time she had done that, she had spent precious time and fluids vomiting and defecating in equal parts into the filthy bucket that occupied the corner across from her.

No one had cleaned it after, and she had simply learned to ignore the reek that permeated the little cell. Laying in the equally filthy straw had seemed disgusting at first, the threat of fleas and disease leaving her wrinkling her nose in horror. Now, now she stuffed as much of the plant material into her little corner as she could to preserve at least a little of her body heat. Everything was precious to her now and could not be wasted.

The bones of her wrists had never been more prominent, her skin never paler. Once she had wanted to be on a never-ending series of diets to keep her skin clear and her body lean. Now, she was perfectly aware that she would put next to anything in her mouth if it had the chance to ease her hunger. Food was not to be taken for granted, water a precious commodity to be hoarded. But most importantly… she longed to see the sun.

She didn’t know how long she had been in the cold darkness, but it was long enough for her eyes to adjust to the gloom in order to navigate the tiny cell. Or she would if she had any energy to do it. There was only the lunge for whatever hard scraps of food that were shoved into her cell, hours staring into the darkness, and dreaming of what she had before the cell had become her entire world.

Sometimes, rarer now than it was in the beginning, a man came to stand before the bars of her cell. He rested his arms behind him, folded against the small of his back where his robes billowed when he walked. His questions made no sense. When they did, she had no answer to give that satisfied him. There were many answers that didn’t satisfy him. And eventually, he had given her that oily smile against his golden-brown skin, slick and vile as he purred at her.

Starvation and dehydration were excellent motivation in his eyes. And they were because she was perfectly willing to answer any question he gave her. But her answers still didn’t satisfy him, and he ran one slender finger against her filthy cheek before he grabbed her jaw hard enough to bruise. She remembered the fall and the pain, the blood clotted against her skull that dried into her ear and caused it to itch something fierce before she had stopped noticing anything important.

Her answers were wrong because she was a liar. Liars had no purpose in this place, but the master of the house was kind and gracious enough to give her a chance to prove her worth. All she had to do was tell the truth. The pain in her head distracted her from the words he wanted to hear, but time and neglect would do his work for him. Eventually, inevitably, she would break and he would have what he wanted from her. One day soon, when her stomach bloated from starvation and she knew what the filth of her cell tasted like out of desperation, she would tell him the story he so longed to hear.

Some part of her remembered that she should stay silent as the grave, that part of her that remembered the warmth of the sun on her skin and the feel of the surf lapping around her ankles. It had been a long time since she had more than the memory to sustain her through the cold darkness and gnawing hunger.

Sleep came to her in fits, nameless horrors stalking her every move through her nightmares. Every moment asleep was terror and every moment awake was pain, and she could feel her resolve fading faster than the strength in her body.

At first, she had tried to keep herself fit and active, sang to herself under her breath so she would remember the way letters felt in her mouth.  _ Mountain bunny, mountain bunny, where are you going?  _ She paced the cell in a poor imitation of caged animals no one had ever heard of. Three steps across, four steps long, just big enough to hold her. The slime and plant-covered grate above her head let in the slow trickle of water from far over her head, and the bars in front of her blocked the only true entrance or exit from her imprisonment.

“What do you know of war?”

She knew quite a few things about war, some historical horrors from generations before her, legends of societies long gone to ash and dust. But she knew that to tell the man who held her in this cell would be a mistake, not even because of the glint in his eye as he ran his fingers across her cracked lips. No, she knew he could never know her people’s history and culture because all he wanted to know was how they made war and not any of the many other things that she knew even the barest of theories of.

He dressed in gold and rich velvets, nails long and yellowed with age, anointed himself in the most pungent of oils to hide the smell of blood and decay that had sunk into every sagging wrinkle and crevice. When he smiled she flinched away from the cracked and browned teeth and their frothing spittle, tried not to look into the madness in his eyes. “Tell me, what magics do your people use?”

She hadn’t been the only one, not even the first. The perfect hole in the stone wall behind him and the gleam of the revolver in front of him had told her otherwise. The empty shells and flattened rounds had spoken of the owner’s desperation, and she knew she wouldn’t see the sun again when he had placed the colorful flap of leather in front of her with its bold black ink and swirling designs. There was another girl who had lasted for only a few cracks of the whip, her broken body forever curled around the corpse of her lover.

He had asked them about war and that girl’s lover had tried to be brave. He spat in the face of danger and told him that Americans did not negotiate with terrorists, but she knew now that Americans screamed like anyone else when their insides were lying warm and wet in their hands. That girl hadn’t stopped screaming until the man angrily slid a thin knife into her throat and she gurgled as she sank to her knees.

The man wanted to know of war as her people knew it, but she would not be responsible for the blood of thousands on her hands. Whatever this man wanted was not something she wanted to be a part of, but her willpower could only hold out for so long. She needed to eat, to drink something to soothe the burning in her throat. He would give it to her if she just but spilled her secrets.

They both knew she was near her breaking point. Her body could no more keep up her fight than her mind could deny the inevitable loss.

She opened her mouth to breathe and no longer winced when her lips split, tongue lapping up the copper liquid as fast as it appeared. There could be no waste, not if she was to keep up the fight for as long as possible. Once she had hummed herself to sleep, but that was before the man had noticed her attempts at soothing herself and stopped remembering to bring her any kind of water.

It was quiet. She had learned to hate the quiet. Quiet meant he was planning something. It meant that she was just one moment closer to breaking under the strain. She licked at her lips again, tired as she turned her face up to look where she could see the damp metal of her cell bars. This was a different kind of quiet than normal, a heavy one that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise and her eyes strain against the darkness. Every breath came heavy in the air, a rising pressure much like the silence before a storm.

If she strained just hard enough, she could hear the clash of metal against metal. Her skin prickled as the air pressure rose and fell, a sudden heat followed by a crackle of static that danced across her body. Something bellowed in the distance before more crashing metal sounded across the quiet darkness. And there, in the ache of her belly, she summoned up her courage.

Walking was out of the question. Most often, she had to be dragged out of her cell by the writhing things the man beckoned forward with the wave of his gnarled fingers. Instead, she pulled herself forward across the cold and filthy stone by the desperate wriggling of her body. Eventually, she pulled herself to the bars, the cold metal biting into her palms as she dragged herself to her aching feet. Every fiber of her being was devoted to pain and loss, but she would give herself just one last moment to hope. The sounds drew nearer and nearer, and she felt her heart in her chest for just one last time.

One last time of hope, borne on the edge of a shout and something like desperation. Her arms, emaciated and covered in filth, slipped through the bars with less effort than it took to hold her in place. She licked at her lips, the skin peeling away under the slightest touch of her tongue. Clearing her throat was another kind of agony, and trying to speak was nothing but a mistake.

But still, still she tried to force the air wheezing through her throat to resemble something like a sound. All her attempts were for naught and all her efforts earned her was pain and the distinct taste of blood in the back of her throat. But still, she tried, coughing painfully around each wheeze. Something was different and her hope flagged.

This was where she would break, and here was where she would die.

“Hopeless, yearning for starlight and sunshine. Afraid to tell him, know it comes. The death of thousands upon thousands from a flash of fire that burns the air and poisons the ground.”

She was too tired to do more than roll her eyes upward, the gaps of skin from beneath the figure’s hat nearly glowing in the darkness and giving the illusion of a body in front of the bars. The figure reached slender fingers towards her, and she shivered at the suggestion of contact. Too close, too much truth whispered into the quiet.

He turned to her like a sunflower does the sun, the hat tilting up until the tiny gloom glinted off the whites of his eyes. “You’re lost. No, that isn’t right. Stolen, abandoned until you forgot the sun. That isn’t right. I can help.”

Tired eyes blinked at him, the soft earnestness of his voice a balm on her shattered soul. Someone wanted to help. Even if that someone was a strange boy with a large hat that stood in front of her cell like a ghost. He wouldn’t hurt her, not as badly as the man who had locked her away to die had intended. The boy looked at her with a wavering sort of fiction, almost like he would disappear if she questioned his existence.

“I won’t. I won’t leave you. You need me.”

Her bones ached as she nodded, the ligaments and tendons in her neck no longer used to the movement. She needed him more than anything else. Otherwise, she would be alone to face the inevitable. Her arms could barely hold her up against the bars and she began to list aimlessly to the side. Yes. She needed him. She needed him to bring her freedom and the chance to save lives she had never met. She needed him to hold her accountable for even the smallest slip of the tongue that could lead to a damning repeat of horrible history.

She could see his eyes glimmering in the darkness, the brim of his hat bending against the rusted metal bars. Closer and closer until she could feel the heat of his breath against her cheek and touch the rugged patchwork of his clothes with her fingertips. His hair was pale and his skin paler, body lean and lanky in ways she would have been jealous of before.

“Count her ribs and count the calories. Pale as paper because she vomited in the toilet. Stand up straight and don’t let them see you cry. You’re beautiful, I won’t let them change that. I’ll help you. Don’t cry, I’m here now.”

He knelt so that her fingers brushed against his hat, the slide of metal against metal a surprise in the quiet darkness. “I came for you.” The snick of the lock was almost a siren in the dark, and she could hear the thump of her heart as he opened the bars and caught her when she fell. “My name is Cole.”

Cole was stronger than he felt in the darkness, gentle when he touched her. He felt more solid and real than anything else she had experienced in this nightmare, and she clung to him as if her life depended on it. His fingers twitched like hummingbird wings against her, hard metal in his palms held carefully away from her withered body. She was too tired to mind the dirt that rubbed off on him as he steadied her against him long enough for her to lean her shoulder against the wall without sliding down onto her knees. Everything was whirling, a mess of sensations she had long since become numb to, and the sound of her heart beating loud as the ocean in her ears.

Cole held her steady even as he fluttered against her, somehow more and less real than the hell she lived in. “I won’t let you go,” he whispered against the crown of her filthy head. He was so much taller than her, and she was no more able to fight against his hold than a baby bird could. He scooped her up into his arms as if she weighed no more than a feather and cradled her head to his chest. “Safe to fly in the bright blue sky.”

_ Mountain bunny, mountain bunny, where are you going? _

_ Bouncing, bouncing as you're running. _

The wet dampness of the stone walls around them loomed in the darkness, creeping ever closer as he ran. Cole didn’t run like a normal person, one foot in front of the other without even seeming to look at where he was going. Not that it would be possible to see in the darkness, but she found herself glad for it when the thick copper smell grew stronger and stronger with each pounding beat in her head.

She knew better than anyone else what happened in these dark halls, the grime on her skin, combined with the sluggish creep of blood a testament to that horrible man’s dedication. He wanted to let loose the genie in the bottle, open Pandora’s Box to set loose the evils within. But she should have told him. The numbness in her arm had spread and spread, and now there was a strange smell of rot that worsened with every waking moment. He had pressed on it until the pain came back and she screamed and screamed…

Cole did not slow his pace for anything, including her ever-weakening gasps and the grinding of her teeth. His every step was sure and steady as he cradled her to his chest, slipping through the darkness as she faded away with each heartbeat.

  
  


“And how do we know? Inquisitor, you must think of these things before you just take people home with you!” The woman’s voice was firm, accent unplaceable but tone measured and deliberate. “She could be anyone!”

The snort could have come from any number of livestock, probably a cow, but it was followed by a deep booming ‘ha’ that rattled her bones. “Oh just look at her. She’s about as dangerous as a babe. Besides, do you think Cole would have brought her if she was going to be a problem?”

“As much as I hate to say it, Cadash, the Seeker might actually be right. Even if she isn’t dangerous, she’s still a problem. How are we supposed to take care of an unknown woman in the middle of the freezing back ass end of Orlais without sacrificing why we came here in the first place?” That voice was closer, warmer sounding, and probably had something to do with the warmth at her back that made her shiver and shiver. “She’s not going anywhere on her own, not like this.”

The female voice made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat, but the warmth around her seemed to kick up with every snap that filled the air. “I’m not saying she’s a threat, Inquisitor! But look at her! What are we supposed to do?”

Cold fingers pressed gently against her forehead. “You woke her. Hello. Do you remember me?”

She tried to sit up, she really did. But all she managed was a broken moan through cracked lips and the searing pain that was her throat. Cold wetness was pressed firmly against the corner of her mouth, the squeeze of the rough fabric bringing more and more droplets of blessed water to ease her suffering. Cole. His name was Cole, and he had saved her.

“Yes! I am Cole. I heard you, and we came to help! But I do not know how to help you now.” She had kicked a puppy in her last life if the sadness in his voice was anything to go by.

But the warmth against her back rose and fell in a careful tempo, and she felt more than she heard the warm sigh at her ears. “Cole, you’re going to scare the poor girl.”

The cold fingers withdrew like lightning before they tenderly began to pet at her hair. “She isn’t scared. She is just lost. Lost and confused, because she does not know.” Blearily, she squinted against the dancing firelight to look at his face. Pale, pale as the moon and freckles across the bridge of his nose, Cole beamed hopefully down at her. “There, she knows. She is free now. No more stone walls and bad water, only the freedom of the open sky.”

All of her wanted to tuck her head into his hand, but instead, she blinked slowly up at his earnest blue eyes. He was a ghost, one of vengeance and goodness, but he was still her savior. And he knew all the things she couldn’t say, not with her throat burning and the numbness creeping into her body.

“Yes! I am Cole, but I was Compassion.” The fire lit up his face, hidden beneath his floppy hat, and she could see the whites of his teeth as he smiled proudly at her. “I’m not really a spirit anymore.”

Someone sucked air through their teeth and the warm bars around her waist tightened slightly. “Cole, what’s her story?”

The boy shook his head, his hat flopping with each movement. “She’s lost. She needed help, someone to keep her from telling the truth. The sky will burn and the earth would weep, rivers run with blood- no, that isn’t right. The sea would boil and all that was good and green would die. The light would burn it all away.” Gentle fingers kept running through her hair, uncaring of the grime and filth that covered each strand. “We stopped him. He won’t hurt you again.”

Humans were cruel and wonderful all at once, but that was a truth that only Cole could see in her heart. Humanity had done the worst things to each other, laid the truth bare to future generations in wide swaths of black print against white paper. History passed down by the winners to generations yet to come, but each story said the same thing:

Absolute power corrupted absolutely.

He kept stroking at her hair, crooned some wordless thing that soothed her enough for her eyes to flutter closed once more. Cole was kind and some part of her understood that he would never lie to her. So she wept without tears because the horror was over. She was free, and Cole would never let someone do that to her again. Her mouth opened in a wordless sob, skin cracking at the corners of her lips.

The warmth behind her, what she now realized was a person, simply held her against his chest as she cried. Cole stroked at her hair and kept singing to her, and she drifted off once more with the knowledge that everything was well and truly  _ over _ at last.

  
  


Her name was Min-jee Moon, and she had heard enough bad jokes about her name to write a memoir. But that was what happened when you were one of the only Asian kids in a neighborhood full of entitled white people who thought their white bread and white picket fences were the ultimate end goal of society. It wasn’t like she really wanted to be famous for being the daughter of the man who ran the Asian grocery store, but that was all she had.

Min-jee had tried to blend in once. She bleached her hair some strange shade of sickly carrot, kept it bobbed against her chin just like Monica, and even auditioned for the cheer squad. It didn’t really help her home life, not when her mother frowned at her and her father said he wasn’t going to raise a harlot. Her skirts were too short, her shirts too tight, and she was going to bring shame upon their family before she was twenty.

She hadn’t, not really. But Min-jee hadn’t exactly brought  _ honor _ like the Disney movies said she was supposed to. There was no dramatic cutting off her hair with a sword, no catchy musical number about how someone would make a man out of her.

Courtney Jones liked to joke about that behind her back during the crueler parts of her schooling history.

Not that it mattered really. Min-jee was Korean, and the story of Fa Mulan was an inherently Chinese concept that was entirely foreign to Min-jee. Well, the part about honoring her ancestors was very much familiar territory. Territory she had disdainfully turned her back on early into her life and only picked back up again during the latter half of it. Her culture and ethnicity were nothing to be ashamed of, and it was a pity she didn’t realize that until she was in the back stacks of a library with a foreign exchange student telling her she was amazingly promiscuous for a Korean girl.

No, Min-jee Moon was the second generation daughter of two different Korean immigrant families, and she had dozens of ancestors she let down over the ages. She didn’t want to learn piano, had no talent at all for any musical instruments. Honestly, she sounded like a wailing cat in heat whenever she sang and had resigned herself to being completely tone-deaf. She was no good at math and the thought of going into the stressful medical field gave her hives. Min-jee was a nobody at her core and content to trudge along like the rest of her generation, for all the shame it brought to the Moon ancestors.

Later she would rebel against the expectations of her parents, tongue faltering over hangul characters as her fingers traced their shapes. But Min-jee Moon was  _ normal _ and there was nothing wrong with that in her eyes. Her rent would still be the same if she was special, and her last boyfriend would still drunkenly cheat on her with pretty white girls who wanted their little touch of Korean soft culture. She would still have to go to work and never have the weekends off, cursed to deal with the stupidity of the unseen masses even as she struggled to bite her tongue when asked ever-increasingly idiotic questions.

Maybe she would settle down with a good Korean boy and give her grandmother cute little Korean American babies to spoil, as long as she did it before she was thirty and her womb dried up from disuse. Or whatever ridiculous superstition her grandmother scolded into the phone. Time was relative, and the world was doomed no matter how you looked at it. The best she could do was make the most of what time she was given.

  
  


Something smelled like grilled meat, a sweet smell not unlike pork that crackled with oily fat that splashed as it boiled. It had been so long since she had eaten anything, boiled bone broth dripped into the corner of her mouth notwithstanding, and her stomach squeezed viciously in its attempts to let her know that she needed to fix that as quickly as possible. The warm band around her waist and behind her back had transitioned into firm weights pressed against her shoulders. Something held her down and she thrashed in an unseeing attempt to set herself free, body curled up against the cold ground as her teeth bit down deep into something.

Pain was not a new abstract concept anymore. But this was a different kind than she had become so quickly accustomed to. The smell of rot grew in the air and she managed just enough air to scream as each hot slice brought more of the sickly sweet aroma, the warm slickness against her arm the only sign that she still had sensations left in the limb.

“Andraste’s  _ ass _ , hold her down Kid!” The gruff bark of that voice was all that he needed to hear and the cold fingers fluttered down against her temple as he breathed with his nose against hers.

Cole hummed under his breath and she screamed without words, his legs straddling her waist and keeping her in place with the weight of his not-quite-there body. “Shhh, I won’t let them hurt you. We’re here to help you.”

He wouldn’t lie to her, couldn’t lie to her. Not with his eyes so sweet and damp with the tears she could not shed. Not when he breathed in and she followed his pace, the rot spreading in the cold until all she could feel was searing fire as they carved and carved.

“Once upon a time, long long ago…”

  
  


Min-jee threw her head back and laughed, the long fall of her blue-black hair falling over her shoulder as her arms waved in the air. Faster and faster as the tail lights bled into the distant night, her knees clinging to his hips as he leaned into the turn. “C’mon, that can’t be all you’ve got!”

The shine of his helmet under the streetlights gleamed as he turned to take just one look back at her. “Arms inside the ride at all times, Minnie!”

She stuck her tongue out at him as she laughed. “Fine, fine.” Her lip quivered playfully as her hands slid inside his jacket to grip tightly at his shirt. Min-jee pressed her chest to his back, curled her head into the hollow beneath his helmet. “Such a spoilsport.”

“Yeah yeah, but you love it though,” he teased before he revved the engine once more, the growl of the motorcycle swallowing his next words while they leaned into the next turn.

All she saw was the bright blue-white of headlights, the blare of a horn, and the shriek of metal against plastic-

  
  


“Not that one. Show me a better one.”

  
  


Her Grandmother always made the best dumplings: pork and vegetables all tucked neatly into pockets of crispy dough. Sometimes she steamed them in a basket on the stove, but Min-jee could watch her crimp the dough edges for hours. Turning and turning in her hand, fan folds turning circles into little half-moons of deliciousness. Grandmother would always sing under her breath and Min-jee would hum along in her own broken way, her wrinkled fingers quick as lightning to seal the edges.

And in the end, Min-jee would smile over her mouthful of boiled potatoes and duck when Grandmother playfully tried to smack her for showing her teeth while she ate. “Aigoo... These Americans have taken your manners away, my little mouse.”

Min-jee loved her Grandmother and all of her little stories, the pretty dresses from ages past that had spent the winters mothballed in the attic. Grandmother told all kinds of stories from her childhood, of dokkaebi and gumiho, emperors and generals past. Min-jee loved those stories, but she loved her Grandmother’s dumplings the best.

“Grandmother? Do you ever regret leaving Korea?”

Her brows rose out of surprise before she turned to her granddaughter with a puzzled expression on her wrinkled face. “What would I have to regret when all I ever wanted is right here?”

The old woman clacked her chopsticks above her rice, luring Min-jee’s gaze with all the skill of a viper. “My little mouse, you know better than anyone. Home is where you make it, not where you are born.” She gave her grandaughter the ghost of a smile, lips barely turned up at the corners. “Why would I miss what is long gone when I made something much better here?”

And Min-jee had laughed, tucked into her side dishes and dumplings with aplomb. Her Grandmother was never wrong, just full of sage wisdom that all old people seemed to be made of once their crow’s feet marched down their faces.

  
  


She tasted leather, her tongue curved around the stiffness as her mouth tried desperately to produce enough saliva to moisten the unforgiving thing jammed between her teeth. She would have choked on it if it wasn’t for the cold fingers pressed against the sides of her face, Cole’s thumbs bracing the thing as her head tried to thrash about on the cold ground. She tried to gag, tasted the acrid bubble of bile that was all her bloated stomach knew how to produce anymore.

His knees were shoved up below her ribcage, elbows on her shoulders. Someone else had to be holding her legs down or at least had been if the tingling pressure in her calves and thighs had anything to do with it. But still, Cole folded himself over her prone body like a gargoyle. His breath fogged between their bodies, sweet and heavy as he lured her into a false calm. “Little mouse, little mouse. Home is across the waves and beyond the sky, but where will you make your nest?”

She breathed when he breathed, black eyes locked onto icy blue that blinked when he blinked. It was better to drown in memory than it was to live in the present, but the cold fingers would dig into her head when she lingered too long in the past. He crooned at her, pet at her hair like a child, rocked back and forth on his knees as he kept her from thinking.

The warm wet had spread across her arm, a mass of fire and pain that she was so accustomed to that all she could do was scream around the thing in her mouth with each scrape of the blade. He wouldn’t let her fade into the dark comfort of oblivion, wouldn’t let her do anything except keep her eyes locked on his and her breath panting out to mix in the air between them.

Someone cursed, low and heavy, as something colder than ice was poured over the numbed agony that comprised her arm. She couldn’t feel her fingers, not even when the voice cursed and pricked at her fingertips, the knife carving twice and thrice more into the meat of her body. Still, it smelled of rot and decay, sticky sweet wrong that gushed out and ruined the once clean snow. “Andraste wept, what happened to this poor girl?”

“Hush and hold her still Varric! We have no time for this if we are to save her like the Inquisitor wishes.” The lone female voice barked at the unseen source of the former warmth against her back, and she wanted nothing more than to laugh.

There was no saving her.

She was already dead.

Dead and lost, a spirit resigned to walk the realm of the dead until the governors of the dead saw fit to lead her to her assigned eternity. Her body was not her own and probably belonged to some poor soul lost to the hospitality of that man. But she had tasted air beyond the walls of her cell, and she knew that part of this was a lie.

Her eyes were heavy, slow to blink, and slower still to open. All the while Cole kept his vigil over her body, the cold points of his fingertips all she needed to remind her that this was her reality.

But over and over, every time she closed her eyes, she could see the body of the woman who had tried to sell her talents in place of the story that man had wanted to hear. Her face had frozen that way, the grim rictus of death keeping the muscles contorted into the last scream she had made before that man had slit her throat and left her corpse there as an abject lesson to the rest of them.

Her name was Min-jee Moon, and she had survived at a cost that she had yet to understand in a place she did not want to call her own. But like her Grandmother before her, Min-jee Moon would make her home where she found it.

She breathed in the freezing cold air and breathed out a thin cloud of fog in the space between two bodies. Her eyes were slow to open but open they did, and she looked into his ghostly blue eyes with a fire in her own.

She was the descendant of a bear woman, the daughter of immigrant dragons, and Min-jee Moon would do her ancestors proud.

_ Mountain bunny, bunny _

_ Where are you going? _

_ Bouncing, bouncing as you're running. _

_ Where are you going? _

_ Over the mountain peaks, peaks. _

_ I will climb them on my own. _


	2. Skyhold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for:
> 
> Bad medical practices  
> Injury descriptions

The stew was not for sipping. If Min-jee wasn’t so starved, it wouldn’t even have been for any kind of consumption. But hunger made for the best seasoning. It was enough for her to gulp what little broth down that the grandfatherly man with the bulbous nose deemed her ready to put in her body. She would have liked him even if he hadn’t been one of the people who had saved her from that terrible place, with his rosy cheeks and full white beard. He looked like he could have been someone’s grandfather, despite the crag of a scar that split his brow and cut through the bridge of his nose, and he complained enough about his old bones keeping up with the younger crowd for it. When he laughed, he slapped at his enormous belly and threw his head back to truly live in the moment. The man had earned his crow’s feet over a lifetime of laughter and merriment, and it showed in every twinkling wink and terrible pun.

The other man, dwarf as she was instructed to call them, with the strong nose and stronger jawline was almost as kind in a different kind of way. Both of them kept Cole from hovering over her shoulder with every waking moment, and they took turns balancing her in the saddle of the horse that had been forcibly requisitioned at a camp Min-jee hadn’t been awake long enough to see. But the first man, he was the one that mattered the most. He held himself with a quiet expectation of efficiency out of everyone around him, that stern elderly face reminding her more of her grandparents than anyone she had ever met. Min-jee still refused to call either of them a dwarf, but Wulfram Cadash and Varric Tethras seemed to be perfectly pleasant people to be around for all that their rib cages seemed to be formed around stout barrels.

At least they seemed to be so long as you ignored the plate mail, chain mail, leather coats, massive battle-ax, and overly complicated crossbow. Or any one of a thousand bits of personal and professional bits of equipment they had strewn about their persons and camp.

Cole had tried to teach her the names of the metal pieces that comprised Wulfram’s armor. And it wasn’t as if Min-jee didn’t want to know, or that she was trying to ignore Cole on purpose. She was just too tired, sore, and much too cold to pay attention. She burned up when it was cold, sweat so much that salt-crusted her skin and the muck that covered her bled out in grimy black and brown patterns across the blankets she was wrapped in. Most of her time was spent in a feverish haze, everything around her swaying as her eyes struggled to adjust to the light as it reflected off the bright white snow. 

The woman with the no-nonsense braid wrapped around her hair was named Cassandra. Cassandra Penteghast was a Seeker, and the sword she kept strapped to her waist was longer than Min-jee’s forearm and twice as terrifying. Which was still nowhere near as terrifying as the woman was. But, for all of Min-jee’s need to tuck herself away from what was clearly the kinder part of this hallucination, Cassandra had been the kindest of the people who had taken Min-jee out of that cell.

Oh, Cole was sweetness and light himself, but Min-jee had been informed that Cole did not count as a person. Cole had been very careful about telling her that he was a Spirit, and thus did not count.

If the dokkaebi that had saved her life wanted her not to count him as a person, Min-jee was not about to argue with him.

“I’m not a goblin. I’m Cole.”

Min-jee had been around her Grandmother long enough to know that her Face of Neutral Displeasure was almost the same as her Grandmother’s, and she had no qualms about turning that expression on Cole in lieu of the words that her mangled mouth still could not produce.

A dokkaebi was not a goblin, but whatever. The dokkaebi was allowed to decide for himself what he wanted to be called. This one happened to be named Cole. There wasn’t anything wrong with that.

There was, however, something deeply wrong with the stew that Wulfram was so carefully ladling into her mouth. Cassandra had put a quick stop to any of the males in the clearing keeping her upright by means of holding her in their lap, and the older woman had become as much of a guardian of Min-jee’s decency as she was capable of. The woman was extremely capable and probably had her picture in the dictionary next to the word capable. So when Cassandra said it was time for Min-jee to eat, then it was time for her to open her mouth and let Wulfram or Varric dribble the greasy and strangely bland stew broth into her mouth.

Broth was not supposed to be chewy. Min-jee may not have been a professional chef, but even she knew that much.

“She wants to know why the broth needs teeth.”

Varric, the one who somehow had part of his chest exposed in the freezing air, laughed. “Well, at least you know it’s dead.” He passed a cloth across the stock of his crossbow, polishing the wood with a dedication most men only reserved for their lovers. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with druffalo stew. Cassandra made it after all.”

Min-jee had the feeling she was the only one who heard Cassandra click her tongue under her breath. “It is not as if I have had time to pursue the culinary arts. If you have such opinions, feel free to do better, Varric.”

Wulfram wiped Min-jee’s chin with a cloth with such mindless skill that he clearly had experience with spoon-feeding on a consistent basis. He winked at Min-jee as he set the bowl to the side. “Now, now children. Let’s not argue. Otherwise, I’ll be more than happy to let you explain to Josephine why it is that we managed to save a girl from a blood magister in almost our own backyard and none of us could keep her fed.”

“Josie is kind. She will like you. Your hair is long and she likes braiding. And ruffles. She likes ruffles.”

Min-jee would let Josie braid her hair all she wanted, so long as she could get something to eat that didn’t involve so little seasoning that hunger was all that made it taste good. Food was not supposed to have the same taste as boiled leather, and Min-jee was horrified that she even knew what that tasted like now. Cole and the rest were very good at making sure that Min-jee wasn’t thinking about what came next, but the more often they did it meant the more Min-jee knew was happening.

Eventually, the joking would die down and Cassandra would shift what little weight Min-jee had into the center of her lap. Varric would turn his back on them, in an illusion of privacy that even Min-jee knew was a lie but still appreciated all the same.

In the six days that Min-jee had been in their care, there was one part of her day that she dreaded with every fiber of her being. And as she grew stronger, slowly but surely, they knew she would try to run away from it as much as she could.

Cole was always gentle, more careful with his slender and cold fingers than Wulfram and his chubby ones. And he always knew how to do it so it didn’t hurt nearly as badly. But it still hurt and Min-jee would rather eat glass than take care of the problem herself. He pressed cold fingers to the crook of her elbow and Min-jee looked away with tears in her eyes.

Cassandra never said a word as she unfolded the blanket and exposed Min-jee’s nearly naked body to the cold air. Better for her to be cold in Cassandra’s lap than stumbling into the bushes in a feeble attempt for freedom that would end with a crossbow bolt in the snow at her feet and a wordless howl of defeat.

Not that Min-jee would know.

The thing attached to her body was not her arm. Her arm had never looked like that. Her skin was pale and unmarked, soft, smooth, and supple with only the tiniest bit of tan to prove she went outside at all. There was no way the mangled thing could be her arm. A mess of puffy and mottled red, green, black, blue, and purples, what remained of her forearm was an emaciated chunk of indignation. Each day the limb would be unwrapped, releasing another waft of sickly sweetness as Cole slipped the fire bright edge of his knife into the largest raised portion and let the resulting mess drip down into the fire.

He chewed on a bundle of leaves that he had disappeared and returned with in the wee hours of one morning, turning the little mass into a sticky paste that he smeared onto the seeping wound. Each day a bit less green and black-streaked fluid leaked out into the fire, and each day the pain rose ever higher. “Solas said this would help.”

Cassandra made a disgruntled sound under her breath, and Min-jee would have laughed if her arm wasn’t a mess of burning pain and agony. Min-jee jolted in Cassandra’s lap and the other woman squeezed her muscled arms around the smaller woman’s starvation distended middle. “It’ll be over soon,” the woman tried to reassure her, still careful not to let her gloves or clothes touch any of Min-jee’s exposed skin for fear the grime would rub off.

Anyone who ever tried to tell Min-jee that Cassandra was unkind would meet the business end of her displeasure. That was all she had, especially when her body was a constant flux between a useless wet noodle and a livewire of pain. But Min-jee would be more than happy to defend Cassandra against any and all comers… at least so long as no one pulled out a sword and tried to fight her for Cassandra’s honor. Min-jee was more than a little bit in love with Cassandra and she would probably still try to fight duels for the other woman’s honor.

Well, if Cassandra would let her.

Cassandra didn’t like speaking directly to Cole, nor did she like making direct eye contact with him. That was also fine with Min-jee. While her dokkaebi was her personal savior and the sweetest thing since her second-grade crush on Brad Donovan, Min-jee understood that dokkaebi were not for everyone. What mattered was that Cole was entirely in the land of the living to help, and her Grandmother had told her enough stories from the olden days for Min-jee to have developed a fundamental understanding of the basics of the land of the dead.

“You won’t die! I won’t let you!” Cole looked up from his careful ministrations with a frown, quick fingers folding a new and clean cloth neatly over the now honey sticky mess that was her arm. “The little mouse isn’t allowed to go!”

Varric and Wulfram were surprisingly quiet for such bulky men, and Cassandra was careful not to say a word about Cole’s outburst. After so long with Cole and Min-jee speaking partially in her mind and his mouth, they had quickly become accustomed to the strange way the two communicated.

Min-jee stretched one shaking arm out toward Cole, her cold fingers equally pale against his cheek. Of course, she wasn’t going to leave. Who would her dokkaebi look after if she was gone? Clearly she was already dead, otherwise, this entire place would have made no sense whatsoever. Who walked around with swords and crossbows, full armor, and knives strapped to their belts? For that matter, who still used horses as a primary method of transportation when a car would be much better for navigating the frozen mountainside.

If she was still alive, why had no one taken her to the hospital?

Why had so many people died in that dark and forgotten pit?

No. Clearly she was already dead and just waiting for her soul to be judged. Maybe all the religions had just a piece of it all right and she just hadn’t picked the right one that had it all down. Either way, she was here. Here, with her dokkaebi and his strange friends that had taken her away from that man and his horrible questions that she couldn’t and wouldn’t answer.

Her fingers trembled against his cheek, and Cole flinched just the tiniest bit against her fingertips. “I’m not a goblin. But you still can’t leave.”

Wulfram gave a mighty sigh and poked a long stick into the fire. “Cole, she’s not going anywhere. What kind of an Inquisition would we be if we just let a defenseless young lady like your friend stay in that forsaken pit and then let her flounder her way to civilization? No. We’re taking her back to Skyhold with us, and we’ll see what can be done to find her people.”

Cassandra nodded against Min-jee’s back, gentle arms folding her back into the warm bundle of cloaks and bedrolls they had scrounged up to keep her warm on the trip up the mountain. “The Inquisitor is right. The Inquisition has to stand for something better. Even if it’s… helping your friend.” The words almost sounded like pulling teeth, and Min-jee was not surprised to see Varric visibly hold himself back from making a snide joke at the other woman’s expense.

“I like the little rabbit. The little rabbit thinks I am sweet.”

“Kid, you are sweeter than Daisy in the middle of a pile of mabari pups.” Their argument had the same air as a long-standing point of contention, one that made Cassandra purse her lips in discontent. Varric hefted his crossbow in his gloved hands with a long-suffering sigh before he gave up in the face of Cole’s frantic hand-wringing. “Look, she’s your friend, right? You literally dragged us out of Skyhold in the middle of the night to find her. Is your friend the kind to just up and bail out on you?”

That was an excellent question that Min-jee would have loved to answer. Unfortunately, with her throat a mess of raw flesh and agony that had only just barely begun to heal, there was no way for her to oblige even the simplest of requests. She had faith in her dokkaebi, because Cole had come to save her when no one else even knew she existed. To know that he was the reason that she was even alive… Min-jee did her best to smile reassuringly at Cole. Cassandra could make that disgusted noise all she liked, but Min-jee knew perfectly well on which side her bread was buttered. Her most likely entirely inappropriate lady-crush on Cassandra Pentaghast aside, Min-jee intended to stick to Cole’s side so closely that Cole might as well have been a member of her family.

The same family she would never see again.

Cassandra coughed in her own polite way into her fist. “This is all well and good, but we must make for Skyhold on the morning. We have valuable work to do with the Inquisition. Perhaps… we will help this lost soul find her way later.”

Min-jee nodded, the only arm she could bear to lift reaching up and out to curl around Cole’s fingers in a mockery of a hug. She could not stand to be touched for any longer than necessary, the dirt and grime that covered her still caked on tender skin that ached from the cold air. For all the horrors her cell had contained, it had at least been a closed-off space that she could curl into in order to preserve what moments of warmth that she could. Now she could only keep herself warm by the grace of whatever body could tolerate her disgusting self in order to keep her warm.

Cassandra, for all that Min-jee loved her, did not want to touch her bare skin for any longer than the older woman absolutely had to. Cole was the only one who wasn’t bothered by her current state, and Cassandra was vehemently against any of the older men seeing more of Min-jee’s skin than was necessary. Both women had come to an unspoken agreement that the wild woods were not the place to have a bath, especially after the first time they had tried to wait for a bucket of snow to melt enough for Cassandra to wipe at Min-jee’s frozen body and it had taken so long that Min-jee had fallen asleep. Time was more difficult for Min-jee to measure now, but she made do with what routine her rescuers had established.

Cassandra didn’t say a word as she carried Min-jee to the tiny tent that had originally belonged to Wulfram. The small party would have taken turns on whose tent she slept in each night, but the sheer strength of the unwashed stench that Min-jee produced once she was warm was enough to convince them to sacrifice just one tent and clean it later. Cassandra was gentle as she arranged Min-jee’s limbs to her satisfaction, but she was less of a fan of bedside conversation than Varric.

  
The next morning they would be at Skyhold, and everything would change.

  
It was difficult to find a building to compare Skyhold to. The massive sprawl of the Inquisition was held within its outer walls, spread out over the churned mud and slush in much the same way that rice fields were arranged on mountainsides. But the most impressive part was the long bridge that separated the outermost reach, the cold and ageless stone that seemed to disappear into the fog before the true heart of Skyhold broke into the world in a burst of impossible greenery covered stone. Skyhold proper was built on the peak of a mountain, stone buttresses and walls jutting defiantly into the somehow tepid air. It was a fortress and a chapel all at once, a veritable testament to the craft and power of ages long past. Not that Min-jee took much notice of it, too busy trying to burrow further and further into the cocoon of blankets and cloaks that Cassandra had swiftly wrapped her into at the absolute crack of dawn. 

The Inquisition waited for no man or woman, and progress had apparently continued with gusto on the reconstruction efforts while the party was away. Varric spared a whistle of appreciation for the hustle and bustle of artisans and craftsmen as they passed beneath the portcullis. Min-jee shivered in Cassandra’s arms, but Varric turned in the saddle of his rather disgruntled and shaggy terror of a horse to fix her with a worried look. He clicked his tongue and angled his head so that Wulfram could see the growing blue tinge to what bits of her skin that could be seen through gaps in her impromptu swaddling. “I think we better get Cole’s friend inside where Solas can take a look at her. Sooner rather than later.”

Min-jee did not know who Solas was and she wasn’t sure she wanted to make the acquaintance of someone whose name sounded like ‘soulless’ in the already confusing madness of the afterlife she found herself in. Cole appeared out of thin air, as was his want and right, as Cassandra’s speckled bay horse slowed in front of a long set of stairs, walking out of thin air as he was so prone to. “Give her to me, I can take her.”

The loud click of horseshoes against stone rang out across the courtyard as the horses pranced uneasily in place in the face of such new sounds. But they were trained, and it was but the work of a moment for Cassandra to carefully pass the bundle that was Min-jee down from the horse and into Cole’s always surprisingly sturdy hold. Her dokkaebi was always careful and gentle with her. Min-jee had less fear of him dropping her and dashing her brains out across the stone than everyone else did, especially when he began taking the stairs two at a time with his long gait. He was frightened and determined, and Min-jee was too feverish and dazed to tell the difference between one step and the next. All she knew was that Cole had an end goal that made him spin around people and things like he knew where they were before they even did.

A step to the left and a swift shove of his shoulder against a solid wood door and Min-jee managed a single gurgled scream at the slam of warm air that hit her lungs. She regretted it immediately, body convulsing and shaking as all of her being tried to void itself of the surge of sticky wetness that blocked her throat. All she remembered later was a clatter and a low curse before her body was deposited on a hard surface and all of her coverings were stripped bare. But Cole held her hand without fail, always the left one that didn’t throb in agony with every breath she took and tried to hide his frantic worry beneath the strange melody he crooned as she finally slept.

He always held the left, because her right was no longer her own.

  
It was warm when she woke, the kind of warm that smelled of cinnamon and spice and seeped into every pore. Wherever she was smelled like herbs, the mellow tea her mother liked to drink instead of coffee each morning, and some trace amount of patchouli that would have made every neo-pagan store proud. It was easy to wiggle on the soft thing she laid on, her skin soft and only a little raw from what had probably been an impressive amount of scrubbing, and she could feel the shift of clean fabric against her skin.

Sitting up was a struggle, but Min-jee would not let a little bit of exhaustion and heavy breathing prevent her from leveraging herself upright with the help of her one functioning elbow. Her right arm had been bandaged from the elbow down tighter than Cole had managed, a sure sign that a professional had taken a hand in her care. Breathing came a bit easier, and she could see that some of the more serious cuts and bruises had been cleaned and rubbed with some strange grease that smelled faintly of the same patchouli and tea that filled the air. Whoever had taken a hand in her care had been thorough enough to change her clothes as well as scrub her down, and Min-jee could only hope that this meant her nightmare had come to an end.

She did try to swing her legs over the edge of the simple bed, the dim flickers of faraway starlight more than enough for her to see by, but she only exhausted herself even more with her struggles. Eventually, she fell back onto the bed, the soft prickle of clean straw a strange comfort when compared to the rancid and molding remnants of straw she had been forced to make do with for the longest time. Wherever she was now, it was miles and leagues better than where she had been before. But this wasn’t her home, and so she could not allow herself to rest easy in the face of reality. Carefully she needed to figure out where she was and what was going on, preferably before her situation could go sideways.

Min-jee had no idea where any of her rescuers had gone, and so she busied herself with the all-important task of figuring out her current surroundings. It didn’t really take her very long as the room she was in was alarmingly small. It looked much like a closet that someone was using to dry their herbs in, one where someone had shoved a small wooden cot with a straw-stuffed mattress into the corner like an afterthought. The blanket on the bed was a stark contrast to the room: a warm and thick red woolen affair with black and yellow geometric patterns that smelled faintly of whatever Wulfram used to keep his beard in order. It was at least one sign that she hadn’t just been shoved away into the room to toil away for the rest of her life. Wherever she was, Wulfram had been in to see her and left what was obviously his blanket to keep her warm.

The room itself was just slightly chilly, the air dry in order to preserve the integrity of the many bundles of plants that hung from every available surface. Sturdy wood darkened with age and bearing the marks of recently having been thoroughly scrubbed, held up a relatively bland stone ceiling that had been scrubbed just as thoroughly. Oddly, the wood flooring, just slightly uneven and bumpy, showed more signs of age than anything else in the room. What had been layers of polish had since been worn away by ages of foot traffic, and Min-jee resigned herself to the thought of never wearing slippers in this room. That was if she was even allowed to leave the room. But Min-jee had faith in Cole and her rescuers enough to know that they would never bring her somewhere that would lead to further harm. Across the little room was a series of small windows, more of notches than any proper thing to curl up and read under, allowing the starlight through their dusty panes and painting the floor with three long rectangles of dim light.

Next to the head of her cot was a small wooden table with a curiously fat and lopsided candle, the brassy holder neatly pinning down a piece of rough paper with rough markings scratched onto it. Min-jee’s eyes had long since become accustomed to making the most out of the tiniest scraps of light, and she floundered for only a moment before she was able to slide the paper out from under the surprisingly heavy candle. It was coarse, far thicker than any paper she had ever used, and the fibers of it were visible even in the half-light. The black lines that almost seemed to march across the page with their harsh angles and strong lines, didn’t even seem to be any sort of sensible alphabet she could understand. Well, it wasn’t like she was an expert in such things, but it seemed as if this was some system of writing and as if someone had tried to leave her a note. Min-jee appreciated it, truly she did, but she bitterly wished that whoever had left the note for her had used at English characters.

She would have even accepted terrible Hangul. At least that was a lettering system that was nearly impossible to mess up. English was notorious for having a vocabulary that was partly formed from linguistic highway robbery, but Korean Hangul was at least designed to be accessible to the common man. Whatever this writing was, it very clearly was the common writing of the dead, and Min-jee was mildly offended that Korean wasn’t even considered as an option. Maybe the forefathers of this particular afterlife were Vikings?

It would explain why she had been secreted away to recover in what appeared to be some clearly well-used stillroom, walls lined with curious jars with faded paper labels and ceiling beams fairly dripping with preserved greenery. Vikings were supposed to be big on cleanliness and big stone buildings were rather typical of northern people across the ages. They had more mountains and less trees, so it made a perfect amount of sense to Min-jee. She sighed, pressing the palm of her hand into her eyes as she let the paper drift into her lap. Whoever had left this had wanted her to know something. Seeing as how she understood what her rescuers had been saying on their impromptu and much-unwanted adventure, it wasn’t outside of logic to assume she could read whatever had been written on the page.

She couldn’t, but the thought was nice. It wasn’t like she could write back, even if they had left her something to write with. Once, when she was young and still stupid enough to play dumb drinking games with coeds, she had tried playing a round of Pictionary with her left hand. Her clue had been a house, and what she had managed to produce looked more like a drunken octopus. Any attempts at fine writing with the one remaining hand she had left at her disposal would most likely end in some sort of Satanic attempt to summon a demon from some nether region. With her luck, that demon would ruin whatever fragment of the afterlife she had ended up in. And then she would have betrayed whatever trust Cole had placed in her when he saved her from that man and his madness.

The sky here would never burn, not as long as she had breath in her body left to defy him. It didn’t matter that she was dead and gone, her world in pieces and left long behind, she still had a duty of responsibility to her savior. Her dokkaebi had walked through the frozen darkness to find her, and Min-jee wasn’t sure if she was worth it.

“Little mouse, left alone in the dark. You’re awake.” He perched on the end of her cot like a gargoyle, knees parallel to the ground, and arms draped loosely between his legs. She could barely see him in the darkness, but the pale of his skin and the shine of starlight on the metal bits of his floppy hat were all she needed to confirm his identity. “Varric says I have to ask. Do you feel better?”

Her arm fell back on the bed with a tired flop, her hand making a comfortable dent in the soft woolen blanket. “Ah,” was all she could manage. It was more than she could before, and her throat felt much less like she hard gargled a mix of glass shards and salt, but it was still a deeper tone than she had managed before. But she could produce sound again, and she could feel the tears prickle at the corners of her eyes. She could speak, and that itself was a miracle.

The edge of his hat tilted in silent contemplation, but Cole said nothing about the tears that began to streak down her cheeks. “You’ve been asleep for five days.” The spirit boy fiddled with a knife, the deadly edge flashing in the starlight. “Solas said you’ll recover.”

Min-jee stroked at the fabric wrapping her other hand. She cleared her throat once of the thick phlegm that coated it, and Cole vanished in the space of a blink to reappear with a wooden pitcher. It wasn’t as if she had any other options, so she let him hold the pitcher while she drank from it like a starving bird, some part of her mind knowing that she needed to go slowly lest she vomit up all the water. But it was cold and clean, smelling faintly of the wood surrounding it and a touch of sulfur from the well it had been drawn from, and she had never tasted anything more delicious in her life. Cole cradled the pitcher for a moment before he placed it on the little table, and he awkwardly fidgeted as the silence stretched on.

Min-jee couldn’t stand to see him look so lost, and she pulled back the corner of the blanket to expose the thin sheet below. Cole looked just as confused, and she groaned as she shifted just enough to make space for his lanky body on the cot. She patted the empty space next to her and tilted her head. “Come. On,” she managed to croak out. Cole’s confusion grew, and she reached for him with an exasperated huff. Her silly dokkaebi didn’t understand her, and so she tugged at his arm until he at least got the hint.

She smacked at his feet until he got the point and took his boots off. While he lined them fastidiously under the edge of her cot, Min-jee took advantage and swept his floppy hat from his head. When he yelped, she snorted in such disgust that Min-jee hoped she made Cassandra proud. “No. ‘ats. Boots. In. Bed.” Speaking was difficult but still manageable and Min-jee was delighted to know that after so long in the pit she had not somehow forgotten how to talk altogether. Cole’s eyes were wide as she shoved at his shoulder and he laid down gingerly on his side. Min-jee grunted as she tugged at the blanket, and Cole had to help her fold the edge over him as her wrapped and aching arm needed to remain on top of the blankets in order to heal.

They laid like that, facing each other in the darkness, and she could count every single one of his freckles across his nose. Each breath mingled in the space between them as they lay in the darkness. Eventually, she couldn’t help herself, a very basic human need coming to a pressing point. “Cole?”

“Yes?” He was eager, always eager to help. In another life, Min-jee was fairly certain her dokkaebi had been a puppy. In fact, she had come to the conclusion that the world needed to see Cole buried under a pile of puppies. “I like rabbits more.”

“Oh. Kay.” She smiled at him, her arm folded under the pillow to give as much of the surface to Cole as she could. “Bunnies.” He let her press her forehead into his chest, and eventually he figured out the goal and folded his long limbs around her for the night. And they lay like that, twined around each other on the cramped little cot, until Min-jee’s breathing evened out and she fell back asleep.


	3. Nature Calling

She woke up because her bladder was screaming at her, her mouth was dry, and her body was finally warm for the first time in what felt like forever. Slender limbs tangled with hers beneath the warm blankets, and steady breathing ruffled at her hair. The sun shone brightly through the windows and lit the room with an almost ethereal glow, motes of dust dancing in the air as she held her breath. Cole made tiny sounds in his sleep, faint little whines as he tried to press himself against her in his sleep. She would have liked to watch him in what seemed to be a rare moment of peace that the bags under his eyes claimed he needed just as much as she did.

But her bladder would not allow him this moment of respite.

Min-jee set about poking Cole in the shoulder with her one good hand, steadfastly ignoring whatever guilt she felt in favor of the growing pressure and desperation. “Cole. Cole. Wake. Up!” She hadn’t had siblings, but somehow she had the feeling this was what it was like to have an idiot brother that crept into her bed at night. He wiggled closer, the drool at the corner of his mouth glistening in the daylight. “Cole!”

The frantic desperation in her voice was enough to have him falling out of bed. His long limbs flailed as he hit the floor with a loud thump and his boots fell over when his socked feet smacked into them. “Little mouse?”

“Cole. Bathroom,” she hissed through her teeth, her one good arm raised up in the age-old method of babies and the infirm. Her toes wiggled in a tapping motion as she rolled her eyes skyward at the uncomprehending look on his face. “Carry. Me. Now!” Min-jee had all the patience of a cat in a bathtub, and Cole leaped to his feet in a show of grace she only ever dreamed of being able to match. She snapped her fingers at him, and he bolted to scoop her up in his arms, his socked feet pounding against the wooden floor.

At any other time, she would have appreciated the speed at which Cole moved. Halfway to vanishing, he clutched her to his chest as she clung to him like a koala. Somehow between the two of them, they managed to get the stillroom door open, and Cole put his long legs to good use. “Where, little mouse?”

“I don’t know! You live here, not me!” Min-jee rasped out, her one good hand pounding on her dokkaebi’s shoulder. “Bathroom, Cole. Bathroom!”

Cole looked around the halls with the desperation of the ages, his confusion plain as day. “I don’t… I don’t know!” He howled, Min-jee gave a wordless scream, and Cole jumped over the railing from the second floor to the bottom of the stone steps. “Varric!” Cole could be surprisingly loud when he wanted to be, and Min-jee didn’t really care, she just needed to use the little lady’s room. “Varric! Where’s a bathroom?”

“What.” Min-jee could ignore her bladder long enough to process the words that had come out of Cole’s mouth. Her brain was so busy processing that emotions could not load simultaneously, and all she managed was a blank flatness that made Cole even more confused. “Cole. What?” Apparently, Cole had no idea what a bathroom was.

The blond head that popped up from the bench behind the cold stone building was unfamiliar to her, ears as wide as her grin. “You what? Oh, the creepy stalky’s friend. Varric’s not here. You need something?” In a world where people lit things on fire with their minds, made the walls crawl with blood, and ran around with swords strapped to their belts, the thought of encountering an elf was not that complex. But this elf was nowhere near like the one she had met before. The blond looked to be the friendly sort, but the grin on her face was like she was barely holding herself back from making a bad joke.

Min-jee would have loved to be included in the joke, but instead, the only thing she cared about was the pressure in her bladder, and the cold that crept up her bare legs. It was almost as if the lady elf wanted nothing to do with Cole. She kept her distance as if it would ward off the very thought of him breathing near her. But there was something calculating about the elf that settled something for Min-jee. “Need to pee.”

The bark of a laugh that the elf gave was enough. “You came all this way to take a piss?”

“Yes.” There was no point in hiding it, and she desperately needed to use the bathroom before something unfortunate happened. Her legs were almost glued together, apart from the frantic jiggle that every child mastered at some point, and she felt like crying. “Please.”

The elf jerked her head, and Cole stared in the direction her chin indicated. “You’re looking for the long shack with the single door. Can’t miss it. Maybe try and get a pot at some point.”

Min-jee smacked ineffectively at Cole’s chest with her one good arm until he got the hint. He ate up the distance with his usual loping gait, the blonde's laughter following them like a braying siren, and Min-jee only cried a little bit when they neared the shack the blonde elf had directed them to. “Oh thank God,” she sobbed as she wobbled through the door. Cole tried to follow her like the puppy he was, and Min-jee hissed at him until he retreated.

What happened between a lady, a wooden bench, and a deeply dug hole in the ground was her business and no one else’s.

Shame there was no plumbing, and Min-jee could take a pretty good guess on what the elf meant when she had told her to look into getting a pot. Emptying the pot once daily would save her from visiting the shack any more than was necessary.

She hobbled out with a face that had seen the trenches and come back irrecoverably altered. Min-jee grasped at Cole's outstretched hand like the lifeline it was, clinging to him with all the frantic desperation of an octopus. No words would pass her lips on that hell, and every hair on her body rose in response to the cold. She shivered and Cole's eyes went wide.

"Cold," she muttered as he nodded. "Clothes?" She couldn't walk around Skyhold in just a thin shirt and both of them knew it, but the searching look in his pale blue eyes made her sigh. "Need real clothes."

He took her back to the little room the same way she had come from it: cradled in his arms like a babe as her body shivered from the chill that she could no longer ignore. He set her gently back on the little cot before he vanished, and Min-jee sighed in relief as she burrowed herself back in the blankets for a much-needed rest.

He would take a long time to return, and the sun had long passed its zenith by the time he suddenly reappeared with an armload of fabric.

The only clothing Cole could find had been discarded or forgotten, left behind by members of the Inquisition that had either passed on or left Skyhold. It wasn’t like Min-jee could be picky, not when it was that or wander around Skyhold in nothing but the long shirt she had woken up in. And that clearly needed to be returned to its proper owner as soon as possible, for the shirt had clearly been an offhand loan from somewhere in Skyhold. And by loan, Min-hee had a strange suspicion that it had been purloined from some fancy soul’s laundry.

The ruffled bottom brushed against her thighs and Min-jee stared uncomfortably at the garments Cole had placed on the wooden cot. In theory, she understood what these pieces were but, in reality, Min-jee had no idea what she was supposed to do with any of them.

Skirts went in one pile, jackets and shirt of all kinds, some sort of slip was set on top of woolen tubes Cole said were socks, there were piles of ribbons, what looked like leather thongs but thicker, odd bits and ends of fabric, and so on. It had never been clearer to Min-jee that Cole had no idea how to function as a human being before that moment. Browns, yellows, greens, dark blues of all shades, Cole had dug up numerous bits of clothing for her to use.

Min-jee flat out refused to wear some of the more complex and expensive pieces. Those would be noticed by the owners or their loved ones, and Min-jee had no desire to be dragged before the local law enforcement for stealing something precious. Jewelry was ignored right out, even if it was nothing but carved bone beads and wooden combs with broken teeth. Sizes were irrelevant in the face of the cruel reality of the elements, and Min-jee swiftly began sorting the pieces into categories. Useful, return, and questionable, rinse and repeat. Most of the garments were destined to be layered over each other, so some of the useful pile had become focused on the texture of the fabric rather than its visual appeal.

Some of the clothes were clearly older than others, spots thin from use and time. Most of them fit her poorly, but she gamely strapped them on her body in desperate layers to stave off the chill that seemed destined to permeate through the stone walls of her little room. Aesthetics did not matter in the end, not when she could see the pile of snow on her tiny windowsills.

But, like all good things, her peace would come to an end.

The man in the doorway with his bald head and long ears gave her a delicate bow. "Good afternoon."

All she could do was nod at him, her body aching and every fiber of her being tired. He spoke and all she could do was listen. Each word damned her with every breath, and there was no taking back what had been said. Her eyes glazed over, and she all but forgot the exact words he used.

Time passed, and she counted each day by the number of times Cole shook her awake to spoon thin gruel and thick stews into her mouth. He hid her from the world and she could only thank him for it. This was a cell, but it was far nicer than the accommodations she had endured for so long that she had forgotten what courtesy felt like.

Min-jee didn’t want to be the center of attention in this sort of place. But what she wanted and had been ignored in the face of strife and disaster, and Cole breezed past her protest with the careful application of a sad smile. She still wasn’t sure how it ended up going this far so quickly, but here they were and there was no coming back from it.

Solas, not pronounced like the word ‘soulless’, had apparently declared her as fit as he could make her. The fine details had been lost on her as she watched the light play off the top of his bald head and the tips of his inhuman ears, but Min-jee had at least understood the implications. The only things that would make her better were time, rest, and her own hard work. Solas had exhausted his resources, at least those that he had deemed worthy of being spent on a random stranger, and his time would be better served assisting the Inquisition’s work. Whatever that work entailed.

Min-jee was not part of the Inquisition. She didn’t even know what the Inquisition was, least of all what they even did. As far as Min-jee was concerned, her only focus was on getting better. And in order to do that, she needed to have a safe place to recover. That part, at the very least, made sense. Cole’s refusal to let her leave the Inquisition and find her intended corner of the afterlife was sweet… but did not make sense.

She leaned on walls to hold herself upright, body weak from who knew how long she had spent in the care of that madman. Solas had told her that she needed the exercise to regain her mobility, and Min-jee had no desire to be a burden for any longer than she absolutely had to. Not that it would help.

No one judged her for her inability to read, at least not as far as she knew, but it had the unintended side-effect of cutting down on the things she could do in order to earn her keep. Anything with physical labor was outside of her physical limitations, and Min-jee was at a loss for something to do in order to keep a roof over her head.

But all of that didn’t explain why Cole had oh so proudly carried her into the room full of what could only be called the Inner Circle of the Inquisition. She was not a big deal and did not have the capacity to become a big deal. Her dokkaebi could suggest otherwise as much as he liked, but Min-jee knew perfectly well what her limitations were. Being worthy of standing in the room with the four bigshots of the organization that had saved her life… was not within her skill set.

She spoke softly now, her throat irrevocably damaged fro, hours of screaming and begging for mercy, and she was now forced to choose her words carefully to avoid pain and any further damage. No matter what she said, it wouldn’t change the fact that she was undergoing the job interview from hell. A distant part of her mind had to applaud Wulfram for his staff because the man and women before her were so unspeakably pretty that she felt two inches tall and nowhere near attractive enough to be in the same room.

“The little mouse needs to stay.” Her dokkaebi was very insistent on this, and on anyone else, it would have looked like he was pouting. But his eyes flashed in his permanently morose face, and the little gathering of people stared at him like he had grown a second head. “She has to!”

Min-jee was not surprised when Cassandra rolled her eyes at the spirit. She was, however, surprised when the red-haired woman across from them appeared to take her dokkaebi seriously. The other woman inclined her head slightly, a graceful ceding of the floor to the spirit in lieu of the discussion the council had been having before Cole had so rudely barged in. “Very well. But the Inquisition cannot afford to feed and keep her for no reason.”

”I want her to stay. I promised I would help her.” She did appreciate how dedicated he was to keeping his word, but there had to be limits to how far he was willing to go. “She knows. We can’t leave her. If he finds her, then he’ll know what she knows.”

Oh. Suddenly, everything made a terrible amount of sense. “Cole. I didn’t tell.” She hadn’t. For all the threats, violence, and suffering… she hadn’t told. Not a single word about her life had left her mouth. Whatever had passed her lips had been nothing but useless drivel. Not even when he had slit that woman’s throat in front of her cell and made her watch her die.

The red-haired woman swiveled her focus with the grace of a hawk about to swoop. “You almost did the last time, didn’t you? You almost gave your secret away.” She wasn’t particularly cruel when she spoke, merely stated a fact that nonetheless had Min-jee flushing out of embarrassment.

Min-jee didn’t have anything to say against that accusation because it was the truth. She had no worth here except for the one thing that modern society knew as a fact. It was a peacekeeper, an energy source, and a weapon all at once. History had been made and altered according to the flow of scientific progress, but this one thing had shaped the meaning of an era.

They had become death, destroyer of worlds, and there was no putting that genie back into the bottle.

If that man had brought her to this part of the afterlife, had sacrificed so many others who had refused to tell the story of the later souls… then it was something that could never be said out loud in the part of death. Cole didn’t understand how Min-jee didn’t understand the higher levels of mathematics and engineering. But he had seen the aftermath in her soul, the same aftermath that she had seen printed in black and white in the pages of her history books and across documentaries, and he was now as bound as she was to keep the secret.

“She’s the last one.” Wulfram had kept silent through the conversation, but the old man spoke into the heavy silence. “She was the only one in that pit that was left alive. But what’s the worst thing she could possibly know?”

The armored blond man rested a gauntleted hand on the pommel of his sword. “Whatever it is, is it worth all this fuss? Do we even need to entertain this?” He inclined his head to Min-jee with a wince, and she steadfastly attempted to look everywhere but at his face. “No offense is intended, serah. We will, of course, endeavor all precautions. But perhaps this is a matter that would be best solved by finding you some sort of suitable employment to occupy your time.”

Min-jee grimaced and took a moment to formulate a response that would make sense. “The war to end all wars.” That got the blond man’s attention rather quickly, and he shut his mouth with a click to stare unabashedly at her. “We found a way to end it.” She swallowed and closed her eyes, suddenly nervous now that she was telling souls from ages prior of the madness their descendants would create, her one good arm bracing her against the table. “And we tell our children. And their children. So we never do it again.”

Cole almost vibrated on the spot at her unspoken question. “A mage could do it. If they summoned a demon, they could.” Well, that answered that. Even if the level of technology here was so backward that Min-jee was prepared to trade questionable favors for a Hershey’s chocolate bar, there still existed a group of souls that believed hard enough that magic was real to make it real. And those souls could somehow make nuclear fission happen.

The red-haired woman was almost gentle as she leaned forward, the shape of her cowl engulfing her face in shadows. “What could they do then? Why were you and your people being held there? Can you tell us?” Min-jee could hear the crackle of parchment under a glove, and she cracked her eyes open just long enough to catch a look at the greedy glint in the woman’s eyes.

Min-jee closed her eyes again with a heavy sigh. Human nature was predictable, and there was always one person who needed to know the consequences. “We made a weapon. Used it twice. Ruined everything. Hydrogen bomb, nuclear explosion.” She may not know the exact how, but the knowledge of its existence was enough. In this part of the afterlife, she had seen people light things on fire with the power of their minds. The souls here were old enough they knew nothing of chemistry or physics, thermodynamics, or the industrial revolution. Cole, her sweet and darling dokkaebi, regularly disappeared and reappeared as his primary method of movement. The impossible was possible when you were dead.

Wulfram nodded, rubbed at his beard as he thought about it. “And can you make it?” His mustache wobbled under his lip, and he took advantage of the silence to watch his advisors’ reactions to the shaking young woman’s words.

Min-jee barked out a gross laugh that ended in a hacking cough that pulled at her throat. “Hell no.” She could no longer support herself, and she sagged against the table as her body rapidly approached its limits. “Not me. I don’t know that kind of math.” Min-jee took a deep breath and cleared her throat of phlegm. “But I know what it does. And the how.” The smile on her face was a mockery of joy, a grim slash across her face that boded ill. “All it takes is… water, air, and some glowing weird rocks.”

The red-haired woman and the blond man inhaled at the same time, but the woman spoke first. “So simple then? But what does this weapon do?” Her excitement and desire for knowledge had yet to be tempered by the true terror of what humanity had done. She was Oppenheimer before the Manhattan Project, and Min-jee was responsible for smacking her with the harsh truth.

“A light that consumes everything.” That was putting it very mildly, but science hadn’t exactly been Min-jee’s best subject in school. “And nothing will grow or live the same for generations after. If ever.” Chernobyl was still an exclusion zone, and Min-jee had spent enough time looking up the procedure for adopting a puppy from Chernobyl to know that even decades later things would still tick on a Geiger counter. The blond man and Cassandra seemed closer to understanding than Wulfram and the red-head, and the beautiful dark-skinned woman in the gold shirt had a well-practiced face of diplomatic neutrality.

Min-jee would never play poker with that woman.

It was Cole who came to her rescue. ‘All life turned to ash in an instant. The shadows of children burned into walls. The land scorched and the oceans boil. Children ruined, people crying out in hospitals as their skin sloughs away. What makes you human is warped and you pass it on to your young if you can pass it on at all. The air has become poison, the water will not slake your thirst. Nothing can live there. Anything that stays will carry it forever when they leave.” He frowned, brows furrowed together as he tried to make sense of the words he pulled out of Min-jee’s head. “You killed them. You ended your war by destroying their cities. Babes in their cradles and mothers hiding under beds. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. A man running down the street as his skin boils off. Chernobyl was an accident. You tried to harness the power of death to power life. Fukushima… you didn’t learn.”

He turned his ghost pale eyes to the Inquisition, and Cole shook his head as he looked at them. “She has to stay. Corypheus can never know the secret.” There was an air of finality about him, and Cole would tolerate no deviation from his quiet declaration. “He will use her to destroy too much.”

Wulfram turned to his advisers with a frown. “Well? Have any of you ever heard of this before? Any of these places? These people?”

The woman with the gold shirt and ruffles looked up from the board she had balanced on her forearm, her quill pausing as she gave Wulfram her full attention. “In all my years, I have never heard of any of this. Supposing it is true, I have heard of no cities with these names or a people who could do such a thing.” She gave Min-jee a gentle smile but shook her head. “You say that your people teach this to their children? Perhaps a scholar of history would be better to find the truth of the matter. I have a few contacts that might be able to provide further insight.”

“Inquisitor, I have to object to all of this. It’s simply not possible.” The red-haired woman pinched at the bridge of her nose in her frustration. “We need to face the truth of the matter. As much as we trust Cole, this is reality. I had my agents look into her while she slept. No one matching her description exists. No one knows who she is, where she came from, or what that mage even wanted from any of those people. It is as if she never existed.”

The blond man frowned. “And what exactly are you trying to say, Leliana? We don’t have the time for your word games.”

“We have no proof. She cannot replicate it. No one knows who she is. All we have is the word of a tortured stranger and a spirit whose only desire is to help.” On the one hand, Min-jee could appreciate Leliana’s practical pragmatism. On the other, she had a terrible feeling she knew where this was going. “In short, Cole’s little friend is more suspicious than she is reliable. Perhaps if we had a practical demonstration-”

“I understand.” Min-jee cut her off with a swift but raspy sigh. “You think I’m lying. Or crazy. But you want to see it in order to use it.”

Leliana gave a slow and terrifying blink, her smile like a cat with the cream and the canary besides. “But you’re a smart one. Inquisitor, she is nothing but a liability.”

The poised woman with the ruffled sleeves gave a small gasp before she all but slammed her quill down on her board. “Leliana! You cannot be suggesting we kill her, or worse. The story and rumors have already begun to circulate. The Inquisitor personally went forth to save her from the clutches of a mad blood mage. She arrived wrapped in the Inquisitor’s belongings, astride the Inquisitor’s horse. Do you know how many rumors are going around that she is somehow involved in an illicit relationship with someone in the Inquisition?” Her lips pursed as she paused. “To say nothing of the rumors that she is somehow the child of the Inquisitor and thus bears the blood of Andraste herself.”

She shook her head, and Min-jee quietly resigned herself to another lady crush. “And what if she is telling the truth? Then we have killed an innocent woman that may be the only representative of another, previously unknown, sovereign nation.” The woman looked as if she wanted to strangle the other woman for being deliberately obtuse. “And if this weapon is real? You would have us have control of something so horrible they teach their children the horrors of it?”

Cassandra made her usual disgusted noise and slammed her hands down on the table. “Enough! She’s harmless. Just look at her! She can barely stand, can’t even walk, and shakes like a rabbit when you so much as skin a nug in front of her. What harm could she possibly do?” Times like these were those that reinforced such mundane things as crushes, and Min-jee was fairly certain her formerly tiny and destined to fade crush on Cassandra would now last for the rest of her life. The taller woman pressed her lips into a thin line and scowled at Leliana. “We are supposed to stand for something better than that.”

Wulfram huffed and turned to the man with the red cape and enough presence to make any male model jealous. “Well? What do you think of it then, lad?” If Min-jee didn’t know any better, it was like Wulfram was trying to teach a group of children how to present better arguments and think things through before they bothered to involve the elderly. It was like the whole concept of being in charge was something he didn’t want, and he expected to keel over from old age at any moment.

The other man appeared to give the matter a long moment of thought. Min-jee took the silence as a sign that she was free to sag against Cole and let him support her. The man gave a heavy sigh like he couldn’t believe he was being involved in this. “Of course you had to ask me,” he muttered under his breath so that only Cole and Min-jee could hear. They had the distinct privilege of somehow being closer to that man than anyone else in the room, almost as if Cole had purposely tried to put Min-jee closest to the one person Wulfram trusted the most. “Maker’s breath, why is this an issue? We’re not going to kill an invalid woman without a copper to her name and only a spirit that wants to become a real boy as her caretaker.”

He rolled his shoulders slightly as if he was squaring off for a brawl against the women across the room. Min-jee couldn’t help but watch him, even when Cole gave up and looped his arms under her armpits to fold over her chest and hold her upright. The man flashed them a hint of a grin and Min-jee could feel her cheeks burning as she blushed. Whoever he was, the man was gorgeous and entirely out of her league. A ten was taking mercy on a possible six on the days her hair cooperated, and her heart almost skipped every time he looked at her. Then again, everyone she had met so far had been nines or tens, and Min-jee was coming to the rapid conclusion that the Inquisition was made up of people who had been so kind and good in life that their souls had simply evolved to reflect the beauty on their insides.

“If there is a weapon, Corypheus cannot have it. If there is not a weapon, then at least we didn’t send an innocent off to die in order to test a theory.” He was adamant about that, and Min-jee could only watch and listen as her fate was decided by strangers.

The scowl Leliana gave could have curdled milk. "Then what do you suppose we do with her, Commander? She's a waste of resources we need."

Wulfram snorted, drawing attention back to him with a casual wave of a stocky arm. "She's far less a use of resources than those fancy Orlesian nobles we have to keep entertained."

The woman in the golden shirt started. "But... is she?" She turned her attention to Min-jee with such fascination that Min-jee had forgotten what it felt like to breathe. "Forgive us, I fear our manners have escaped us. My name is Josephine Montilyet, the Ambassador of the Inquisition. What would you like to do?" She paused, expectant, and Min-jee almost fell over herself.

"Min-jee Moon." Her tongue felt thick in her mouth, so unused to pleasant social niceties that she almost forgot what manners she had been raised with. "I don't... I don't know." The kind smile the other woman gave her was enough to bring tears to her eyes, and she could feel Cole's panic in her bones.

His heart fluttered, spine straight with tension. "You can't leave." Desperate, he didn't notice how his grasp had begun to hurt or how he all but folded around her like a child with their most precious comfort item. His tears were her tears, and all she could do was pat his arm in a pale mockery of comfort. "You have to stay."

Wulfram cleared his throat as Josephine almost appeared to melt on the spot. "No one sad she needed to leave, lad. Now, dry your eyes. You'll do her no good if you cry every time she does."

Cole squeezed her tightly, his hat flopping over her eyes as he all but folded himself around her. “Dark, cold. He wants the words. The hunger never ends, alone in the darkness. Want to go home but the door is barred. The dark is safe where he forgets. So alone. But you aren’t alone. I won’t let you be alone.”

She looked up and his forehead pressed against hers, the icy blue of his eye staring at her. Through her, stuck in memories she would rather forget. But he shivered against her, eyes unfocused as he remembered.

“They forgot me. Left me to die. But I made myself real. You’re different. He pulled you and made you real. But you did not swallow his lies, and so you are still alive.”

Cassandra sucked in a breath, and Cole tightened his grip all the harder. It was like he was trying to crawl into Min-jee’s skin and force her to be in the moment. It wasn’t love, not really. She was as ugly on the outside now as she had been on the inside. Her skin and bones equally pale from the lack of light, her eyes dark where his were light. But the similarities were there, enough for Cassandra to frown as she looked at them. “Is she like you, Cole?”

Cole pressed his forehead to Min-jee’s. “No. She is real because she was made to a different song. Little Mouse brings honor to her ancestors, the bear woman, and the tiger emperor.”

Josephine cleared her throat elegantly in the ensuing silence. “Well. We would be a poor institution of Andraste if we turned the destitute away at our doors.”

Wulfram nodded. “She stays then. At the least, until she has recovered from her ordeal. Cole will look after her.”

She could feel Leliana’s glare from across the room, the large map table no barrier at all to her displeasure. The other woman made no secret of her opinions, and her cold calculating smile made Min-jee shiver from within Cole's embrace. Hook, line, sinker. If there was ever a match between Josephine and Leliana, Min-jee wanted to be leagues away before they dragged her into their games.

But that seemed to be the end of Wulfram's interest in her because he nodded his head once in her direction and that seemed to be the signal that Cole should take her back to what was now, in not so many words, to be her prison.

Well, at least there was a vast improvement from the last cage she had been kept in.


End file.
